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Grass / Carpet Maker Wizard

If you apply grass and or carpet to your models we have created an easier way for you to do it with simple controls that will give you great results, quickly! Make grass or carpet groundcover that can be assigned to any surface using IRender nXt (included from version SA28, Jan 2019).

How it works ...

This Grass or Carpet Wizard allows you to simply set the size and color of the grass or carpet strands. A Density option is provided to allow you to specify the number of grass blades or carpet strands per area. The setting range is from 0 (sparse) to 100 (dense), and you can either use the slider, or type the value you want over the number in the box, or use the toggle buttons to the side of the number. Once you have chosen your settings, click the Create Grass / Carpet button to assign the groundcover you've created to the surface you selected.

How to access the Wizard dialog ...

We have provided you with two ways to access the new Grass or Carpet Wizard.

1. Use the Object Properties dialog and select the Grass or Carpet Wizard:

Left click on the area you want to cover

Right click, then hover over IRender nXt on the list which displays a further list on which you click the Set Object Properties option.

Click the Grass or Carpet Wizard button to display the settings dialog.

2. Alternatively, add the Grass or Carpet Wizard to the IRender nXt toolbar using the Customize Toolbar button on the About dialog.

Creating a displacement material...

We have also added a button under the Materials dialog, accessed via the Materials icon on the IRender nXt toolbar, that allows you to make a Displacement material to do the same type of thing, only use the Displacement Texture parameters of the nXt material to make a material that can be used for grass or carpet. You only need to set the color and size and we create the Displacement material for you to use.

The material displacement method does take more time to render than the groundcover option, but using a material to represent the grass or carpet can be useful since you can set Glow on the material to make a white carpet appear brighter in the rendering, if necessary.